Ramblings of a 23-year-old daydreamer

Tag Archives: real life

I was going to wait until Tuesday to write a post commemorating my two-month anniversary with this city, but I’m feeling thoughtful and I’m feeling reflective and I feel like writing.

Right now I’m watching Innerspace, which is a movie I remember having watched with my sister on TV when we were kids. I have only vague memories of the film, mainly that Martin Short was in it. I’m not sure why I knew who Martin Short was, but not who Meg Ryan or Dennis Quaid were. Clearly we watched this movie before my obsession with You’ve Got Mail began and before the remake of The Parent Trap came out, or else I would have remembered them as well.

I spent the afternoon in Georgetown. My plan was to find a park I had read about, called Dumbarton Oaks Park and spend the afternoon there reading and perhaps even writing. I’m trying to find “my place.” I spend almost all my time alone, but I still long for a place to be truly alone with my thoughts, without distractions, where I can just think and daydream and imagine. I need a place to be solitary, to be alone with my thoughts, a quiet place to bring myself peace of mind. I’m still searching for that here, and although this particular park is rather inconvenient to get to, I can see the potential. Unfortunately, I spent too much time perusing shops and didn’t manage to make it to the park before the threatening storm clouds above me decided to burst.

I’m already used to sudden torrential downpours, and I’m starting to actually love them. On my walk back to the metro, the skies opened and not one, but two different people asked if they could shelter under my umbrella for a few seconds as I walked the direction they were going. The first girl was one of a group of students or college-aged interns who jumped under my umbrella as she asked if she could. I said, of course, and we introduced ourselves laughing before she ran off to huddle under an awning with the rest of her group. Next a woman who was cowering under a tree with her friend called out and asked if she could walk under my umbrella for a second to get to the parking lot across the way. “It’s just my hair will get ruined,” she said. Her hair was beautiful and she wasn’t prissy about it, it was just that she had clearly just gotten it done and was on her way out for the evening. Her friend laughed and ran to take cover and I walked with the woman until she made a run for it as well.

I love summer rainstorms. Being outside in a storm makes me happy in a really odd way. Most people hate rain. I don’t really care much for it when it lasts all day, lazily drizzling for hours and hours, which makes going outside a nuisance. But when rain does what it often does here, which is that it downpours for several minutes in huge drops. It’s impossible to stay dry even with an umbrella. When you’re soaking wet and have to carry your shoes for fear of them being washed down a storm drain, the only thing you can do is laugh. So laugh I do, and so short rainstorms actually make me happier than sunny days.

It’s still not easy, being here, but I think I’m starting to feel more comfortable. The more time I spend in the city (instead of Arlington), the happier I am. So cheers to Two Months and here’s to many more.

I recently returned from a semester abroad. It was the most amazing, experience of my life, and I treasure it completely. I studied in England, in Canterbury, Kent and was fortunate enough to travel quite a bit throughout the UK and Europe.

Before this trip, I was frightened of change. Terrified, even to the extent where I almost didn’t apply to the program, for fear of missing out on the things that I would be leaving behind. Friends, school, opportunities. I worried endlessly about not being able to catch up on the things that I would be missing.

And I was scared of the real world. I was afraid of leaving the only thing I’d ever known – the academic world. So it was natural that my main goal had to do with staying in the academic world, that quasi-reality in which it’s easy to forget about non-academic responsibilities, and even easier to forget that you’re growing up.

But something strange happened while I was abroad. I backpacked through Europe with only one friend. And we did great. Nothing was lost or stolen, we managed our emergencies well enough, and we made it home, exhausted, but accomplished.

And suddenly I’m not afraid of the real world anymore. I don’t want to be in school for another five years. I already have senior-itis, and I haven’t even officially begun my senior year. I want to live in the real world. I want to live in a big city, and have a job to go to every morning, wearing a skirt and high heeled shoes. I want to have office friends and a desk and to bond with co-workers about our busy-schedules and the high expectations of our boss.

I do want that life, though for a long time I’ve been too scared to reach for it.

So here’s where I try and figure out how to go from being a grad-school track Psychology major to a career-track, future HBIC. I’ll land that dream job, even if I’m not positive what that dream job is, just yet.